DieChecker 20,610

DieChecker 20,610

Isaiah 45:7 "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all thesethings."

Also, what you are saying suggests that God didn't create Satan, when by most accounts he is an ex-angel. Who made the angels and built them to have evil within them so they could turn against him? A perfect god couldn't have made a world with evil in it, as it serves no part save to wreck everything, and that is not perfect at all, and would therefore be against the perfect nature of a supposedly perfect God.

It is said you can't have light without dark, and vice versa. I'd conclude that evil is necessary for actual perfection, or it wouldn't exist. Assuming an all powerful benevolent God.

You can't have pure good anyway, without removing Free Will. Sometime, somewhere, someone would disagree, and thus evil would be born again. Evil is just the far end of what people don't like. Pure good can therefore only exist in a choiceless environment, meaning no Free Will.

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Coil 270

Coil 270

On the contratry, the King James translation was only changed in response to the fact that it was so frequently used to point to the fact that God does evil. Christians started to get upset at the fact, but the Jewish Tanakh, from which the quote is taken clearly and unequivocally says "evil" and not "disaster". As all Christian scripture derives from the Hebrew, why not actually listen to the people who made up the whole story in the first place? JPS Tanakh 1917 Isaiah 45:7

This is the version of King James Bible JPS, Tanakh 1917, Jubilee Bible 2000, American Standard Version
Brenton Septuagint Translation, and everyone else uses the word disaster (6 times) calamity 7 times which is closer to trouble and not evil.

In addition, this text does not say God but Jehovah, who was too zealous to ensure that Adam and Eve did not eat from the tree of life and did not become Gods above him.

So you understand why God has no evil?
When all beings are transferred by the Highest Gods to our universe, they are pure and innocent but inexperienced spirit and pure consciousness as a child, but in the material world the human mind can be eclipsed by bad deeds or keep the prescriptions of morality and God.
Therefore, it seems to you that God, like man, has a dual nature (good and evil), but God is above good and evil, above morality and human limitations, small and great but this does not mean that God does not have something true. It is known that God is Sat-Chit-Ananda (True Essence- Knowledge- Bliss.)

Sachchidananda is not affected and does not depend on any qualities of its own forms in all their diversity, immersed in the ocean of time and space with their apparent contradictions and limitations provided for by divine providence. Sachchidananda is the unity of the manifold manifested world, the eternal harmony of all its variations and contradictions, infinite perfection, justifying the existing limitations and the goal towards which all imperfections strive.

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Alchopwn 184

Alchopwn 184

This is the version of King James Bible JPS, Tanakh 1917, Jubilee Bible 2000, American Standard Version
Brenton Septuagint Translation, and everyone else uses the word disaster (6 times) calamity 7 times which is closer to trouble and not evil.

They only use "disaster" because they are scared their god is evil, while the Jews KNOW deep down their god is evil. In any case, why is your god the creator of trouble and disasters. which are really synonymous with evil anyhow? That seems pretty wrong and contradictory for a deity that is supposed to be loving and caring.

As to the text referring to Jehovah, are you sure it isn't Yahveh? After all, God is an old English word, and thus God is obviously an Englishman.

49 minutes ago, Coil said:

So you understand why God has no evil? When all beings are transferred by the Highest Gods to our universe, they are pure and innocent but inexperienced spirit and pure consciousness as a child, but in the material world the human mind can be eclipsed by bad deeds or keep the prescriptions of morality and God. Therefore, it seems to you that God, like man, has a dual nature (good and evil), but God is above good and evil, above morality and human limitations, small and great but this does not mean that God does not have something true. It is known that God is Sat-Chit-Ananda (True Essence- Knowledge- Bliss.)

That is a stupid system. Why would a good and perfect deity ever countenance such a stupid way of doing things? The more you look at it, the more stupid and self-contradictory it becomes. Haven't you ever examined this from a more critical position and said "nope, that doesn't work on any level."? You say that your God is above human morality, but that is merely absolute power corrupting your deity absolutely. A truly good deity wouldn't demand humans follow arbitrary rules that they themselves as gods don't follow. That is called hypocrisy, and given that an all-powerful god doesn't have to be a hypocrite, the fact that they choose to be a hypocrite tells me without doubt that they are evil. I personally choose not to worship evil gods unlike you.

56 minutes ago, Coil said:

Sachchidananda is not affected and does not depend on any qualities of its own forms in all their diversity, immersed in the ocean of time and space with their apparent contradictions and limitations provided for by divine providence. Sachchidananda is the unity of the manifold manifested world, the eternal harmony of all its variations and contradictions, infinite perfection, justifying the existing limitations and the goal towards which all imperfections strive.

So you think your deity is some sort of undifferentiated bliss state? Isn't that just hedonism? Isn't hedonism the very lowest and most self indulgent sort of behavior? It sounds an awful lot like abusing your body's naturally produced store of opioids via meditation.

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Coil 270

Coil 270

So now you transition directly into a full-on New Age trans-cultural theft fest. Most of these ideas have no place in Christianity. For example, the Avidya (ignorance) is a term stolen from Hinduism. Why not just say Ignorance, if that is what you mean? Instead you seek to dress up your questionable beliefs by stealing from traditional belief systems that often found themselves at odds with the whole notion of a single godhead. This just undermines your position. Are you a Hindu or a Christian? You certainly can't be both.

I am not saying that I am of the Christian religion because Hinduism gives answers and Christianity gives partial answers and if you tell a Hindu that God bears evil, he will laugh at it. You cannot therefore understand the thought of Hinduism for this you need a philosophical, shrewd mindset and Christians need a simple explanation of where evil is and where truth is but they are also entangled by the idea that if everything comes from God, it means that God does evil directly or indirectly. And this is the devil's trick to expose God to a two-faced being(although many Christians will still say that God is only good and love, even if he punishes people)

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So God sacrificed all the creatures he made, not himself then. We don't choose to be made, or to live, and rarely do we choose when we die. That is all God's fault

You apparently do not understand that the Absolute is inexhaustible, so God cannot fully enter the universe because any universe is finite and not infinite. In addition, someone must remain at the top untouched by creation in order to supervise the creation of other universes because the process of creation is eternal and there is no first universe and there is no last universe but there is an eternal process of creation in order for every creature to discover God and the sacrifice of God turns into the complete perfection of the Set of Gods (former people) and the triumph of the One and the Set.

2 hours ago, XenoFish said:

Perfection is boring. No challenge, no growth, nothing changes.

On the contrary, with perfection you would work and work would be joy, life would be joy and no one would want to die or be bored with a blissful life in knowledge and creation. God is perfect but he is not bored because Nirvana never comes to be satiated as earthly objects and concerns. Because earthly objects are finite and knowable and God is infinite and knowable endlessly (otherwise he would turn into a finite knowable being-object)

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Alchopwn 184

Alchopwn 184

It is said you can't have light without dark, and vice versa. I'd conclude that evil is necessary for actual perfection, or it wouldn't exist. Assuming an all powerful benevolent God. You can't have pure good anyway, without removing Free Will. Sometime, somewhere, someone would disagree, and thus evil would be born again. Evil is just the far end of what people don't like. Pure good can therefore only exist in a choiceless environment, meaning no Free Will.

Don't you see the false dichotomy in what you are saying? Let us interrogate the notion of free will for a moment.

(1) This deity allegedly brings humans into existence, and gives them free will, but the only thing that free will is actually good for is making you diverge with the will of the deity, and then when you die, because you have diverged with the deity's divine will, you are sent to hell. In any paradigm where free will actually exists, its purpose is exclusively to drag people to hell. Free will never creates a better outcome than the deity in question according to this idea, as the deity is by definition a perfect being, and you can't do better than perfect. In fact, taken from a mathematical perspective of mathematical game theory analysis, free will exists entirely for the purpose of making humans fail and go to hell. Given that this is the least desirable outcome for humans, that means the deity in question is a totally evil monster who utterly hates their creation, and only pretends to be benign, in much the same way that a psychopathic dictator proclaims their own virtue thru propaganda.

(2) Next, the deity in question is all-knowing. We know this because according to scripture, allegedly the deity can offer its loyal followers the power of prophecy i.e. to foretell the future. This means that the future is in fact foreordained. If the future is entirely known to the deity in advance, then in fact humans do not have free will at all, as the thing that makes free will important is that it is supposed to make humans act outside the will of the deity and add some sort of unpredictability to the situation, but the deity knows and sees everything, like some sort of Orwellian nightmare dictator, so in fact humans don't have free will at all, but merely the personal illusion that we have free will. The only way free will is meaningful in this situation is in humanity's relationship to the deity, and if the deity knows everything we do in advance, then free will is an illusion. This means that we in fact already live your a choiceless environment already, but still go to hell for arbitrary infractions.

(3) You suggest the whole "every rose has its thorn" dualism, that evil and good can't exist without each other as a reference point. I have to disagree. An infinitely powerful deity more than has the power to ensure that one side or the other never exists. An infinitely powerful deity can create universe and a worldview without duality. Plenty of other religions work around concepts of removing false dualities, but not the monotheisms. In fact the Hindus said of Jehovah "He is a god of good and evil, but mostly evil, as he is always thinking of who he is going to punish", and they're right, the monotheist godhead is a sadomasochist. Not only does he delight in sending people to the never ending torture dungeons of hell, but he himself even came to the Earth to get tortured and die. Thankfully I don't believe a word of these religions, but I deeply worry about the people who can believe them.

(4) The assumption that pure goodness is a choiceless environment is a very strange idea. Clearly there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of things that humans know about that would constitute good behavior. The notion of pure goodness however would be one where those choices were logically optimized for the maximum possible good. This would create the best of all possible worlds for everyone concerned too, so logically, every effort would have a pay-off for all concerned. As I have already shown in point 2, free will is an illusion, so really, living in an environment where everything went well and life was blissful, there is no reason to assume that humans would be any more aware than they didn't have free will anyhow, as free will is an illusion if the deity is real. We already live in a world without free will if the deity is real, so why not live in a wonderful world, where we still have the illusion of free will, but all our choices are optimized for maximum goodness by a benign deity before we ever make them?

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Tatetopa 6,862

Tatetopa 6,862

It has been posited that God wants to remove the evil from His own nature, and thus he divides himself into smaller parts, sifting the deeds of the good from the evil, as only when the evil is gone can there be a perfect creation. Thus this universe is a trap and a filter for evil. This is one of the more compelling monotheist arguments I have discovered.

Well how do the positers posit that this evil got into his nature in the first place? And where does it go when he filters it out? Seems dangerously like the Time Bandits movie where that one little chunk of evil got missed and left out of the dustbin.

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Alchopwn 184

Alchopwn 184

I am not saying that I am of the Christian religion because Hinduism gives answers and Christianity gives partial answers and if you tell a Hindu that God bears evil, he will laugh at it.

Okay, so you're saying that you are a Hindu by default then. Stop appropriating Christian ideas, it is disrespectful to a tradition that your religion shares nothing with.

17 hours ago, Coil said:

You cannot therefore understand the thought of Hinduism for this you need a philosophical, shrewd mindset and Christians need a simple explanation of where evil is and where truth is...

Well that merely demonstrates your overweening pride and arrogance. It is perfectly possible for anyone to understand any religious system thru study. If a human mind came up with the idea, then it can be understood by other humans regardless of their culture. On the other hand, just because someone understands a religion, doesn't mean they need to accept it as a philosophy, as no philosophy is ever perfect.

17 hours ago, Coil said:

Christians need a simple explanation of where evil is and where truth is but they are also entangled by the idea that if everything comes from God, it means that God does evil directly or indirectly.

I would suggest that entirely depends on the Christian in question, so rather than making sweeping generalizations or do you literally claim to personally know the individual beliefs and personal philosophies of billions of individual Christians, despite the fact that there are thousands of sects of Christianity? As to the Christian notion of evil, you know full well that Christians place the blame for evil on the scapegoat of Satan, and more philosophically on the notion of free will. If you don't then you really haven't got a clue about the religion at all. The next point is, that while Christians try to shift the blame for evil, ultimately all evil must derive from the creator deity, for they made the world with evil in it,

17 hours ago, Coil said:

And this is the devil's trick to expose God to a two-faced being (although many Christians will still say that God is only good and love, even if he punishes people)

It isn't the "devil's trick", it is an error in Christian philosophy. One of many. It is possible to have a god of love that punishes people, it is just that it makes the love in question more akin to domestic abuse. I think that if we sold the Christian god as a deity of domestic abuse, there are still people who would be interested.

17 hours ago, Coil said:

You apparently do not understand that the Absolute is inexhaustible, so God cannot fully enter the universe because any universe is finite and not infinite.

On the contrary, absolutes are unable to be part of this universe at all, as all absolutes form a relationship with everything, and that renders them meaningless. Meaning can only exist as a function of context, and context insists upon finite relationships to have any meaning, ergo, an infinite god is a meaningless god, and a god without meaning is a futile concept. You can talk about this god forever, and all you have done is wasted your time, for it is meaningless. If this god is everything, then it is nothing.

17 hours ago, Coil said:

In addition, someone must remain at the top untouched by creation in order to supervise the creation of other universes because the process of creation is eternal and there is no first universe and there is no last universe but there is an eternal process of creation in order for every creature to discover God and the sacrifice of God turns into the complete perfection of the Set of Gods (former people) and the triumph of the One and the Set.

So again, there is this notion of some sort of foreman deity overseeing construction. The universe doesn't need such a figure, it has natural physical tendencies that we have called the Laws of Physics, as well as the chemical interactions of the known elements that govern its interactions. When astronomers look up into the sky, they can see, map and predict the orbits and behaviors of the various stars and other bodies with enormous precision. This isn't because it is some foreman's work, but because the scientists have discovered and understand the underlying physical principles that govern the interactions. So too with the various things on our tiny planet. There science uses the same methodology to uncover the interactions of forces and chemistry, as well as the patterns of biology that make our world the way it is. There is no god required to set this in motion, it has been in motion since the present iteration of the universe burst into existence, and the longer people have looked at the problem of that initial moment of the universe coming into being, the less there seems to be any creator present, or necessary. God is simply not necessary. Worse, rather than helping us answer the questions of existence, god itself becomes a problem, for raising the specter of god raises more questions of a more useless nature, and that becomes a blind alley; a dirty cul de sac tha charlatans and criminals use ambush and rob us, always preying first on the most emotionally, mentally and materially vulnerable. In this sense all religious people are either victims or vultures.

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Coil 270

Coil 270

The universe doesn't need such a figure, it has natural physical tendencies that we have called the Laws of Physics

The laws of physics do not work by themselves as well as the processes in our body are made while the consciousness lives in it and when the consciousness leaves, death and decomposition of the body occurs.So our universe and all physical laws work as long as God's consciousness pervades and is located in every material particle and object.

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God is simply not necessary.

You could immediately write that God has no place in your vision, so it’s understandable that you didn’t understand his mind and actions.

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Coil 270

Coil 270

Here's a random thought. Earth is hell and we're the fallen angels. So demons exist within our minds and on the streets.

We are angels of last stage who live in mortal bodies on earth.
(9 levels of angels + people = 10. Number 10- the sum of the spiritual and material, micro-universe, completeness of creation, spiritual enlightenment)

But we are not fallen, we just came here according to God's idea to settle the most material level in order to transform our world into a divine in the future.

Therefore, for God we are very important because the whole ladder of angels worked around our mind and body in order to bring evolution to this level. The spirit is above and below is matter (hidden spirit) that should manifest in matter, therefore, the Earth is not a place of exile for wrongdoing but a place for the release of God from matter.So, evolution is the descent of God-spirit into matter in the form of individual consciousnesses, self-oblivion and release at the ascending stage of evolution.

But the demons were definitely expelled from the heaven so they are fallen .

It is necessary to distinguish between hell where people temporarily live for their misdeeds and the worlds where exactly demons live (two-dimensional world).

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openozy 816

openozy 816

We are angels of last stage who live in mortal bodies on earth.
(9 levels of angels + people = 10. Number 10- the sum of the spiritual and material, micro-universe, completeness of creation, spiritual enlightenment)

But we are not fallen, we just came here according to God's idea to settle the most material level in order to transform our world into a divine in the future.

Therefore, for God we are very important because the whole ladder of angels worked around our mind and body in order to bring evolution to this level. The spirit is above and below is matter (hidden spirit) that should manifest in matter, therefore, the Earth is not a place of exile for wrongdoing but a place for the release of God from matter.So, evolution is the descent of God-spirit into matter in the form of individual consciousnesses, self-oblivion and release at the ascending stage of evolution.

But the demons were definitely expelled from the heaven so they are fallen .

It is necessary to distinguish between hell where people temporarily live for their misdeeds and the worlds where exactly demons live (two-dimensional world).

DieChecker 20,610

DieChecker 20,610

Don't you see the false dichotomy in what you are saying? Let us interrogate the notion of free will for a moment.

(1) This deity allegedly brings humans into existence, and gives them free will, but the only thing that free will is actually good for is making you diverge with the will of the deity, and then when you die, because you have diverged with the deity's divine will, you are sent to hell. In any paradigm where free will actually exists, its purpose is exclusively to drag people to hell. Free will never creates a better outcome than the deity in question according to this idea, as the deity is by definition a perfect being, and you can't do better than perfect. In fact, taken from a mathematical perspective of mathematical game theory analysis, free will exists entirely for the purpose of making humans fail and go to hell. Given that this is the least desirable outcome for humans, that means the deity in question is a totally evil monster who utterly hates their creation, and only pretends to be benign, in much the same way that a psychopathic dictator proclaims their own virtue thru propaganda.

Seeing as we do have free will, or the illusion thereof, we know that everything is not perfect. Humans are flawed.

You would be wrong that the outcome is never better then what pure good would be. Without evil, or at least strife, there would be no heroism, no loving reunions, no forgiveness, no mercy, no redemption. These brighten our lives in a way pure good could not do on its own.

True, there would be no lows, but there would also be no highs.

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(2) Next, the deity in question is all-knowing. We know this because according to scripture, allegedly the deity can offer its loyal followers the power of prophecy i.e. to foretell the future. This means that the future is in fact foreordained. If the future is entirely known to the deity in advance, then in fact humans do not have free will at all, as the thing that makes free will important is that it is supposed to make humans act outside the will of the deity and add some sort of unpredictability to the situation, but the deity knows and sees everything, like some sort of Orwellian nightmare dictator, so in fact humans don't have free will at all, but merely the personal illusion that we have free will. The only way free will is meaningful in this situation is in humanity's relationship to the deity, and if the deity knows everything we do in advance, then free will is an illusion. This means that we in fact already live your a choiceless environment already, but still go to hell for arbitrary infractions.

There is still debate on this point in theological circles. The consensus on the "free will is true" side is that though God can know everything, and see everything, He choses not to. Just like you can chose to read this post, or not. You can read any, or all, of the posts on UM, but you chose not to.

God blinding Himself does lead to everyone having choices, and this needing to be responsible for their actions.

The flip side is that God does know what we're going to do and let's us do it anyway. Which is messed up, but hardly evil. You still did what you did.

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(3) You suggest the whole "every rose has its thorn" dualism, that evil and good can't exist without each other as a reference point. I have to disagree. An infinitely powerful deity more than has the power to ensure that one side or the other never exists. An infinitely powerful deity can create universe and a worldview without duality. Plenty of other religions work around concepts of removing false dualities, but not the monotheisms. In fact the Hindus said of Jehovah "He is a god of good and evil, but mostly evil, as he is always thinking of who he is going to punish", and they're right, the monotheist godhead is a sadomasochist. Not only does he delight in sending people to the never ending torture dungeons of hell, but he himself even came to the Earth to get tortured and die. Thankfully I don't believe a word of these religions, but I deeply worry about the people who can believe them.

I think you are wrong. The various non dualistic religions stress that life is an illusion, and do not include a controlling deity. Or they focus on being as nothing... They are philosophical religions , and dont ultimately believe in good or evil. You have no example of a religion that the deity only allows for good.

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4) The assumption that pure goodness is a choiceless environment is a very strange idea. Clearly there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of things that humans know about that would constitute good behavior. The notion of pure goodness however would be one where those choices were logically optimized for the maximum possible good. This would create the best of all possible worlds for everyone concerned too, so logically, every effort would have a pay-off for all concerned. As I have already shown in point 2, free will is an illusion, so really, living in an environment where everything went well and life was blissful, there is no reason to assume that humans would be any more aware than they didn't have free will anyhow, as free will is an illusion if the deity is real. We already live in a world without free will if the deity is real, so why not live in a wonderful world, where we still have the illusion of free will, but all our choices are optimized for maximum goodness by a benign deity before we ever make them?

The only thing I have to point out to sink this point is to point out that all that is required is for two people to have a difference of opinion on what constitutes the best option.

The only way your arguement could work would be if everyone was forced to follow a single individual and resistance was impossible. Otherwise someone will differ, and will be labeled as evil.

I'd tend to agree, that if such was the case we wouldn't even know it, because we'd essentially be like animals, going not off intelligence, but off God enforced instincts.